Completed Challenge: The Ought to Have Read By Now.

Taken today.

It has snowed. Utterly unbelievable! It looked, yesterday, like the daffodils were about to bloom, but now they're under a blanket of snow and ice. Spring seemed so close! The budgies are livid.

Meanwhile, I finished Freud yesterday, which means I have completed my 'Ought to Have Read' challenge. I started it on the 11th November 2011, a sort of pre-Classic Club list (hence I won't be replacing this challenge), and it was a list of books I felt I should have read. Looking back at it now, some of them I do wonder about. Like the aforementioned Freud, which I did enjoy, I have to wonder why it was I particularly felt that should have been read. I dare say it was because I enjoyed Freud in university (Future of an Illusion was a favourite). And the rest, if I remember correctly, were all books I'd either owned for a while or I felt left out having not read them. Some, like the Jane Austen titles, are obvious, however others, like St. Augustine's Confessions and Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, seem rather random now. Again, I think they were old university books. 

So, here's what I've read:

Pre-18th Century

1. Augustine, St. - Confessions
2. Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Cantubury Tales
3. Dante - The Purgatorio of Dante
4. Dante - The Paridiso
5. Homer - The Odyssey
6. Milton, John - Paradise Lost
7. Pepys, Samuel - The Shorter Pepys
8. Virgil - The Aeneid

18th Century

1. Cleland, John - Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
2. Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
3. Defore, Daniel - Moll Flanders
4. Fielding, Henry - The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
5. Radcliffe, Ann - The Mysteries of Udolpho
6. Richardson, Samuel - Clarissa
7. Richardson, Samuel - Pamela
8. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques - The Confessions
9. Swift, Jonathon - Gulliver's Travels
10. Wolstonecraft, Mary - A Vindication of the Rights of Women

19th Century

1. Anderson, Hans Christian - Fairy Tales
2. Austen, Jane - Emma
3. Austen, Jane - Sense and Sensibility
4. de Quincey - Confessions of an English Opium Eater
5. Dickens, Charles - David Copperfield
6. Dickens, Charles - Great Expectations
7. Dickens, Charles -  The Pickwick Papers
8. Dostoevsky, Fyodor - The Devils
9. Dostoevsky, Fyodor - The Idiot
10. Doyle, Arthur Conan - The Hound of the Baskervilles
11. Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
12. Eliot, George - Middlemarch
13. Elliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
14. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust Part Two
15. Hardy, Thomas - Far From The Madding Crowd
16. Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the D’Urbervilles
17. Hawthore, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
18. Hugo, Victor - Hunchback of Notre Dame
19. Hugo, Victor - Les Misérables
20. Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
21. Nietzche, Friedrich - Beyond Good and Evil
22. Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
23. Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
24. Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
25. Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Grey

20th Century

1. Amis, Kingsley - Lucky Jim
2. Byatt, A. S. - Possession
3. de Beauvoir, Simone - The Second Sex
4. Elliot, T. S. - The Wasteland and Other Poems
5. Forster, E. M. - Howard's End
6. Foucault, Michel - Discipline and Punish
7. Freud, Sigmund - The Interpretation of Dreams
8. Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
9. Hughes, Ted - Tales from Ovid
10. Joyce, James - Dubliners
11. Joyce, James - Finnegans Wake
12. Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
13. Lawrence, D. H. - Women in Love
14. Mansfield, Katherine - Selected Stories
15. Murdoch, Iris - The Sea, The Sea 
16. Orwell, George - Nineteen Eighty Four
17. Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
18. Sartre, Jean Paul - Nausea
19. Smith, Zadie - White Teeth
20. Thompson, Hunter S. - Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
21. Walker, Alice - The Colour Purple
22. Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
23. Woolf, Virginia - The Common Reader Second Series
24. Woolf, Virginia - Between the Acts
25. Woolf, Virginia - Night and Day
26. Woolf, Virginia - The Voyage Out
27. Woolf, Virginia - The Years

I can't say I feel particularly well read, having completed this list! The more one reads, the more one finds, and with every book there's always another two or three that spring to mind: two or three unread books that must be bought and made a priority. I think the whole of the Western Canon is my priority and I would happily pile them by my bed if there was room!

I'm glad to have come to the end of this, but at the same time this was never a challenge I felt pushed to really work on. I did think about deleting it when The Classics Club came into existence, but decided not to as I wanted to keep the original list.

What next? As I say, I won't be replacing this one, but I am working on finishing my 100 Greatest. That will be quite a monumental one to finish - one of my motivations for starting this blog was to track working through this one (not that I'll quit blogging when I finish it, of course, the 100 Greatest Novels will be replaced by another Top 100 list). And, until then, the spring clean continues. We're also having some problems with our car, though I'm not sure how serious these problems are yet. Until then, keeping fingers crossed. To be honest, it's taking up quite a lot of my thoughts! That, and this snow. I can't wait for spring, I really can't!